It's a fairly easy answer. Anything can be looked at and enjoyed for its aesthetic value while at the same time deploring its reason for existence. The two are unconnected. The problem is if you start to enjoy the aesthetics so much that you go out of your way to commit whatever unethical act generated them in the first place.

Just as an example if an exploding warship and an exploding firework make the same light pattern. Then objectively they have produced the same explosion and if you enjoy the fireworks, then you can enjoy the exploding warship. That doesn't mean you enjoy the fact that people died on that warship, just that the photons from the explosion happened to hit your eyes in a pleasing array.

The only other issue is if you enjoyed it not because its pretty, but because you are happy that a lot of people just died.

It's a fairly easy answer. Anything can be looked at and enjoyed for its aesthetic value while at the same time deploring its reason for existence. The two are unconnected. The problem is if you start to enjoy the aesthetics so much that you go out of your way to commit whatever unethical act generated them in the first place.

Just as an example if an exploding warship and an exploding firework make the same light pattern. Then objectively they have produced the same explosion and if you enjoy the fireworks, then you can enjoy the exploding warship. That doesn't mean you enjoy the fact that people died on that warship, just that the photons from the explosion happened to hit your eyes in a pleasing array.

The only other issue is if you enjoyed it not because its pretty, but because you are happy that a lot of people just died.

The thought of some of those sparkles being the remains of sentient creatures would hit me so hard, I don't think I'd be able to enjoy fireworks ever again.

It's a fairly easy answer. Anything can be looked at and enjoyed for its aesthetic value while at the same time deploring its reason for existence. The two are unconnected. The problem is if you start to enjoy the aesthetics so much that you go out of your way to commit whatever unethical act generated them in the first place.

Just as an example if an exploding warship and an exploding firework make the same light pattern. Then objectively they have produced the same explosion and if you enjoy the fireworks, then you can enjoy the exploding warship. That doesn't mean you enjoy the fact that people died on that warship, just that the photons from the explosion happened to hit your eyes in a pleasing array.

The only other issue is if you enjoyed it not because its pretty, but because you are happy that a lot of people just died.

The thought of some of those sparkles being the remains of sentient creatures would hit me so hard, I don't think I'd be able to enjoy fireworks ever again.

See that's an inversion of my last point. You would think it's not pretty because you're unhappy that people died to make it. And since you can no longer enjoy warships exploding you can no longer enjoy fireworks.

So, is the crazy lady going back to crazy games, or is there a method to the madness? We don't know what the diplomats were supposed to be discussing, after all.

And I'd expect Putzo to be the smarter of the two, between him and the goddess of plumbing. His brain-box might be smaller, but the civilization it comes from is a lot older.

Just because he has the hardware, doesn't mean he knows how to use it. The civilization he comes from takes a very hands-off approach to how they train their people.

Yeah, seems like he needs some more practice using that new super-brain of his (here I'm assuming that he is residing inside supercruiser, and that supercruiser provides roughly as much brain as his allowance prior to leaving All-Star was)

Wasn't the amount of brainpower the Allstar had measured in liters. He could fit many times his previous allowance in a reasonably sized starship.

Yep, the brain they gave him was 20 liters. That's less than 2 cubic feet. With the right augmentations you could fit that into a humanoid unit like Ptuzho is wearing right now, much less a starship.

You are ignoring all the auxiliary parts needed to make it work. For comparison, CPU in your computer is tiny compared to motherboard, PSU and everything else needed to make it work. Your phone packs it all into much smaller space, but at severe costs in performance.

Wasn't the amount of brainpower the Allstar had measured in liters. He could fit many times his previous allowance in a reasonably sized starship.

Yep, the brain they gave him was 20 liters. That's less than 2 cubic feet. With the right augmentations you could fit that into a humanoid unit like Ptuzho is wearing right now, much less a starship.

You are ignoring all the auxiliary parts needed to make it work. For comparison, CPU in your computer is tiny compared to motherboard, PSU and everything else needed to make it work. Your phone packs it all into much smaller space, but at severe costs in performance.

The human brain is composed of neurons that perform all of those functions simultaneously. It's more than likely any advanced enough system would rely on such a configuration due to the extreme efficiency benefits.

_________________If you need to use a squeegee, they're probably at least Laz-4

Wasn't the amount of brainpower the Allstar had measured in liters. He could fit many times his previous allowance in a reasonably sized starship.

Yep, the brain they gave him was 20 liters. That's less than 2 cubic feet. With the right augmentations you could fit that into a humanoid unit like Ptuzho is wearing right now, much less a starship.

You are ignoring all the auxiliary parts needed to make it work. For comparison, CPU in your computer is tiny compared to motherboard, PSU and everything else needed to make it work. Your phone packs it all into much smaller space, but at severe costs in performance.

I'm not ignoring anything. They said they gave him twenty liters of brain. Presumably that twenty liters of brain includes everything necessary to actually run. It might not include power supply, but even the contemporary galactic technology has power sources powerful enough to let people fly inside a belt. That's more than enough to run a computer.

At worst case he gets a slightly larger head, and then the rest of the body is comprised of all the necessary components to make it work. Just like in a biological body.

Bear in mind that the brain they were using to simulate his natural mind with was 0.007 liters. Plus however much of the thread network was for him. So he got something like a 2,000 times boost.

Eh. Brains don't scale well. The problem is that sure, the number of possible connections grows with volume - but the volume you need to MAKE connections stays the same. One 'cell' has to be physically bigger to connect to more 'cells' than it used to, which tends to eat into your new space.

Weirdly, human brains didn't grow in volume very much compared to the other apes. Instead, we've developed folds - most of the connections appear to be at the surface of the brain, so this was a way to increase the connectivity without increasing the volume. Much of the interior is basically wiring buses. I mean, broadly speaking - nothing in the brain is simple.

My point is, it's not going to scale to something absurd like 2^2000. A number that is significantly larger than the number of electrons in the universe, by the way.

Wasn't the amount of brainpower the Allstar had measured in liters. He could fit many times his previous allowance in a reasonably sized starship.

Yep, the brain they gave him was 20 liters. That's less than 2 cubic feet. With the right augmentations you could fit that into a humanoid unit like Ptuzho is wearing right now, much less a starship.

You are ignoring all the auxiliary parts needed to make it work. For comparison, CPU in your computer is tiny compared to motherboard, PSU and everything else needed to make it work. Your phone packs it all into much smaller space, but at severe costs in performance.

The human brain is composed of neurons that perform all of those functions simultaneously. It's more than likely any advanced enough system would rely on such a configuration due to the extreme efficiency benefits.

The human eye has a blind spot because the bus is sitting directly on top of the image sensor. Evolution is the case of throwing everything in a blender and pulling out solutions until you find "good enough", and then continuing to pull out solutions until you find "better, enough better to beat good enough, even with its lead."

I have no confidence that the basic structure of the human brain represents the most efficient processing matrix available.

You are ignoring all the auxiliary parts needed to make it work. For comparison, CPU in your computer is tiny compared to motherboard, PSU and everything else needed to make it work. Your phone packs it all into much smaller space, but at severe costs in performance.

The human brain is composed of neurons that perform all of those functions simultaneously. It's more than likely any advanced enough system would rely on such a configuration due to the extreme efficiency benefits.

The human eye has a blind spot because the bus is sitting directly on top of the image sensor. Evolution is the case of throwing everything in a blender and pulling out solutions until you find "good enough", and then continuing to pull out solutions until you find "better, enough better to beat good enough, even with its lead."

I have no confidence that the basic structure of the human brain represents the most efficient processing matrix available.

I have no confidence that humans are capable of devising a better processing method, right now, our best attempts at AI are also our best attempts to mimic how a simplified version of the human brain works (including being massively parallel, but not yet being parallel on anything like the same scale as a human brain).

A more complicated design, with more connections and parts, we're not going to understand how that actually works. Even a fairly trivial neural net with only 100 or so simulated neurons and no internal loops is vastly more complicated than we can comprehend.

Intelligent design of AI is beyond us, when we get AI we will train it, and evolve the designs from existing designs, in a way quite similar to biological evolution, and probably in a way similarly prone to getting trapped in local optima.

Of course the Allstar has had millions of years to work on this problem, and a huge incentive to do so. And that's not even getting into what they had before they decided uploading themselves into artificial computing substrate was a good idea.

So yeah. I don't think there is honestly any way of saying how much smarter Putzho is now, or what kind of space requirements he has. Other than that he is talking on an apparently equivalent basis with Petey and Chinook despite only having one cruiser to their huge infrastructure.

I mean that's true, but people die in a lot of jobs. Making fireworks does not inherently require that people die. It's a matter of attention to safety standards.

This is far off topic, but...

Sadly, attending the safety standards doesn't keep people from dieing. In the example given, following the standards lowers the number of people who die- largely by having the smallest number of people possible working in any one danger area. Ideally, only one person per site of a dangerous operation. Two absolute max. And we separate the various danger areas, live material storage & etc. along with putting berms or natural barriers in between.

But some of us still die every year, just not as many. It is the nature of working with powder, always has been.

The human eye has a blind spot because the bus is sitting directly on top of the image sensor. Evolution is the case of throwing everything in a blender and pulling out solutions until you find "good enough", and then continuing to pull out solutions until you find "better, enough better to beat good enough, even with its lead."

I have no confidence that the basic structure of the human brain represents the most efficient processing matrix available.

Turns out that's not a great example of evolutionary missteps.

Here's the thing. You make photopigments. That's how you see! The photopigment is what absorbs light and triggers a receptor. You have to process the waste/damaged photopigment somewhere. If you do it in front of other, GOOD photopigments, the bad ones absorb light you could have used to see with. You do it beside other photopigments, you're using space you could have used for receptors.

So what do you do? Build the sensor inside-out. Nerves are mostly transparent, and you can route the wiring over the areas of the eye least sensitive to blurring. The photopigments MUST go behind the receptors though... and the way the eye deals with that is to bleb them off and let the supporting cells literally eat them.

(I say least sensitive to blurring... there's a chicken-and-egg question if there ever was one...)